Property packages and property package templates

A Property Package is a collection of chemical compounds and calculation methods, specific to a chemical engineering application. TEA differentiates between instances of Property Packages and Property Package Templates.

Property package templates

Property package templates are configurations for a property package; you can use a property package template to instantiate a property package.

You can configure the Property Package templates for TEA from within COCO (by using the Edit Templates button, that is available when choosing Edit after selecting TEA in the Add Property Package window), or by using the external configuration utility 'configureTEA.exe'.

To create a duplicate of a property package, start with creating a new one, and then use Load Existing from the Package menu.

Property package templates are stored in the data file TEAconfig.dat (which is located in [the user's application data folder]\COCO\data). Remove the user copy of TEAconfig.dat to revert to the default copy.

Property packages

Once you have created a property package template, you can use it by adding a property package to a simulation. At this point you will be asked what property package template to use for your simulation.

Some simulation environments, like COCO, will allow you to edit the content of a property package. In the case of TEA, this does not reflect on the property package templates. Also, changes made to the property package template do not reflect on instantiated property packages.

When editing a property package, you can however reload the property package from a property package template. To do so, select Load Existing from the Package menu. Vice versa, you can also save the content of the current property package to a property package template. For this, select Store As Template from the Package menu when editing the property package.

When editing your property package, you can select Check Validity from the Package menu to check whether your package configuration is valid.

Some simulation environments do not allow you to edit a property package. In this case, it is likely that the content of a property package is also not stored (using the CAPE-OPEN defined persistence interface).

For this scenario, it is likely that each time you load your document, the property package is reloaded from a template that has the same name (the name of the template that was originally used for the document). In order to make changes to the document's property package, you will therefore need to close the document, use the ConfigureTEA.exe utility to change the corresponding property package template, and reload your document.

Documents that do not support editing and storing property packages depend on information in the property package template data file "TEAconfig.data". Therefore, when transporting such a simulation document between computers, make sure the "TEAconfig.dat" files for the current user are the same.

Configuration

By default, the Simple configuration mode is used for editing property packages. To edit more advanced features of your package, select any of the options under the Configure menu. Use Simple from the Mode menu to return to simple mode.